During the replacement of the networking onboard nb Tanya Louise with gigabit, the main 8-port distribution switch was also changed. Here’s a quick teardown of the old one.
This has been quite a reliable switch for the internal networking on board, but the time has come to switch over to something a little faster. This switch will be getting repurposed for the slower devices on my network, such as the radiation monitor & the raspberry Pi systems.
Here’s the top removed from the switch. It’s a very simple construction, with a small power supply section & the main switch IC in the centre.
All the magic happens in this main IC, a Realtek RTL8309SB Fast Ethernet switch. This is a feature-packed IC, with support for VLAN tagging, but being in a small unmanaged switch the extra features aren’t used.
Main power supply is provided by a jelly bean MC34063 DC-DC converter, and an adjustable LM1117 linear regulator. Nothing much special here.
The only other parts are the magnetics for the ethernet interfaces, behind the ports themselves.
Hi, is there any EEPROM on FS108 you opened?